


Taking Responsibilities

by thegameissomething



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 03:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegameissomething/pseuds/thegameissomething
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knew he was to blame for Sherlock's death, but just to know was not enough. John wanted him to understand, to face up to what he had done to Sherlock, and to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking Responsibilities

**Author's Note:**

> Second Sherlock fic and first fic in a very long time - I'm really glad to be writing again. The idea came from a post by ughbenedict on tumblr, describing John blaming Lestrade for Sherlock's death and Lestrade believing he was right... I just really had to write it.  
> Also, the kind of Sherlock and Lestrade backstory... I'm not sure where it came from or why I felt the need to write it in, but it's there, anyway...  
> Please don't hesitate to tell me about any mistakes! I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Also, speaking of tumblr... darleks is my url, if any of you were wondering ;D

Lestrade looked up, overwhelmed, yet unsurprised by what he was being confronted with. He had gotten the call three hours and thirty two minutes before and had not moved from the chair at his desk since he had put down the phone. He had simply sat, head in his hands, wondering _how_ , _why_ , _what if_. He had worked out the answers to these questions and extended this silence some more. He was told that John had been with him - had seen it happen. John had witnessed the death of his best friend, Sherlock Holmes, the greatest man that ever lived. And now John was here.

"John-"

The word was left, still, between them, as he simply stared at the broken man that stood before him.

"You turned your back on him! Everything he's done for you, the amount of complete  _shit_ that he's dragged you out of, and you just let him die! After all of that, you bastard, you just let him _die_!"

A look down at his desk, almost cleared, no longer his, provided him with a moment to compose his reply - a meaningless and pathetic reply.

"I'm sorry."

John just exhaled, a strange grin of disbelief and anger. It sounded like the makings of sarcastic laughter and Lestrade could hardly blame him.

"Sorry?! Because less than twenty four hours ago, you were searching our flat for evidence that he tried to kill two kids! He's dead, does that mean nothing to you?!"

Of course it meant something. The man he had tried so hard to change, to save, to keep alive... he was lying on a slab in a mortuary, cold and motionless. It had all started out so innocently. Sherlock had seemed so helpful, that very first time, years ago, going from witness to someone _actually useful_ to the case that Lestrade was attempting to solve. He had looked at this man and wondered where things had gone so very wrong, what had led to this extraordinarily intelligent twenty-something, who could make so much of himself, sitting in a dark apartment, waiting for his next fix.

 _'Just let the kid help you out,'_ Lestrade had thought to himself, _'Just one or two cases, just to stop him pumping himself full of drugs. Just help him get his life back on track.'_

If Sherlock Holmes could not satisfy his addiction to work, he would turn to his other addiction, an addiction that could kill him at any moment. Lestrade had realised what a waste it would be and had simply come up with a solution, a solution that would help the both of them. He had never planned to become as dependent on Sherlock Holmes as Sherlock himself was on the very drugs that Lestrade was attempting to eradicate from the man's life.

 _"So,"_ Sherlock had started to explain, after Lestrade presented him with such an odd proposal, _"You're suggesting I just... sit on stand-by, there for when you need me?"_

_"Well, in short, yeah. I mean, it sounds shit when you say it like that-"_

_"Extremely, yes. I wonder why."_

_"But,"_ Lestrade cut in, claiming back the conversation,  _"I think we can both agree it's better than what you're doing now."_

 _'_ 'What you're doing now' being 'sitting in some crackhole injecting God-knows-what into yourself', though this was left unsaid.

 _"Hmm,"_ Sherlock smirked, somewhat condescendingly, in a style that would become an infuriating trademark throughout years to come, _"Can we now?"_

Lestrade distinctly remembered sighing, patience wearing thin.

 _"Look, Sherlock,"_ he started, _"You can take me up on what I'm saying, or-"_

_"Or you'll arrest me on the charge of possessing illegal substances, yes, I know. You police types are so very predictable. And yes, for 'predictable', read 'boring', though I'm sure you've seen enough police films to be aware that blackmail is hardly the most exciting tactic."_

Lestrade felt as though he had completed a 180-degree turn, as he was now smiling - amused, even - at Sherlock.

 _"Actually,"_ he grinned, _"It's 'or... nothing'. I'm not gonna do anything. It's your choice, you can help me or you can just not. But you're brilliant and you don't seem to have anything else on, no offence."_

_"I have a family."_

_"Yeah, the wonders they seem to be doing."_

Lestrade had taken a few moments to regard the situation between the two of them, worried he had overstepped a mark - Sherlock simply kept his eyes fixed on a mark of dirt on his wallpaper. It took around nine seconds for Lestrade to admit defeat, pulling on his coat to leave the apartment. He was stopped, just half-seconds before it was too late, by a voice in the living room.

 _"You know where to find me.",_ Sherlock called. Lestrade could almost _hear_ the somehow impressed smirk playing across the young man's lips.

That had been the beginning - just the proposal that they could work with one another on one or two cases. But before he knew it, one or two cases had turned into three or four, three or four had turned into nine or ten. He knew it was wrong, using outside individuals on official police business, but Sherlock was fantastic. He didn't want paying, he did it all for the satisfaction of the work, and - above all - he was clean. He was coming off the drugs. Whatever rules the force had, surely there had to be exceptions, and surely Sherlock Holmes was the exception to this one.

Keeping him off the drugs, providing him with the work he craved so much - Lestrade had become Sherlock's life support machine. That much had been made apparent now that he had taken that life support away.

Silence ate away at the air as John regarded him through sore, red eyes. Lestrade stood. He didn't feel he deserved to be sat at that desk, masquerading as Detective Inspector Lestrade when someone else had been doing the inspecting all along. 

"How could you actually believe he'd... Jesus Christ, I can understand Sally and Anderson and that fucking Northern whatever-the-fuck he was, but _you_?! How could you betray him like that?!"

"John, I didn't _want_  to believe it-"

"But you did, and that's why he's dead!", he shouted back, "This is all your fault, you know, one word from you and you could have stopped them arresting him!"

"Sally would have gone to the Cheif either way!"

"But you didn't have to support them, you could have told Sherlock that you didn't believe them, but you just stood back and now he's dead! My best friend is dead! All those times he saved your neck and look what he got back for it!"

Lestrade looked down once again, ashamed by the truth that lay in John's accusations. How could he actually believe that Sherlock Holmes was a fake? Sherlock was unbelievable, yet he had believed in him from the beginning, just like John had - the difference between the two of them was that John had been with him until that last second, until the very end. He had seen the life leave Sherlock, and now Lestrade was watching the life leave John Watson.

Lestrade felt himself breaking down as the realisation sunk in. Sherlock was dead, and someone had to take responsibility.

And both men knew who that someone was.

"Sherlock's dead..." John stated, falling apart, "Sherlock's dead."

Lestrade was well and truly overwhelmed by how quickly John descended into pieces, the man who was normally so composed and proud was now in tears in his office, having had what was most likely the worst day of his life - and given his past, there will have been many before it. The man had lost so many friends over the years, how could it be that he had lost another, one so important to him?

 _It's my fault_ , Lestrade admitted to himself, eyes blurring, _it's my fault that Sherlock's dead_.

Lestrade found himself losing sight of any silently-agreed boundries between himself and John, stepping forward and enveloping the man, who clearly wasn't taken aback by the action - John simply grabbed at the fabric of Lestrade's shirt, crying against him in a way he had not done with anybody since he was a child, despite the things he had been through in the time since then. Then again, Sherlock always did have a knack for eliciting new behaviour in those who surrounded him, and John had been no different - in fact, he had been the prime example.

"I can't believe he's gone...", John told him, shaking his head against his friend. Lestrade simply coughed and nodded, though John couldn't see the gesture for himself. In silence, they stood, in that same position for a length of time that neither were sure of. Lestrade was simply taken away from conciousness, wrapped up in guilt over what had happened and what he could have prevented.

He reflected back on the things he had admitted to himself in the hours after he found out...

_How? Why? What if?_

Sherlock had fallen, he was told. But he hadn't fallen. He jumped. John made a statement to the police, explained that Sherlock had called him, forced him to watch, told him 'this phone call is my note'. Sherlock hadn't _fallen_ from the roof of St. Bart's - the action was much more deliberate.

Lestrade found himself once again aching, aching with the guilt that he knew he held rightly... because he _knew_ Sherlock Holmes, far more than he or Sherlock cared to let on. He knew his strengths, his weaknesses, his countless quirks and his rarely seen normalities - he knew that Sherlock's downfall was that he craved approval, appreciation, admiration. 

" _That's the frailty of genius_ ," John had once said, as the three of them examined the evidence to a case, " _It needs an audience._ "

Lestrade was impressed by the comment, though a look to his left saw Sherlock smirking, pleased - he soon decided that the observation was probably a repetition of something Sherlock had told John some time ago. John always had been the biggest boost to Sherlock's ego. Sherlock was proud of John, proud to call him his friend, his flatmate, his partner-in-crimesolving. He was proud to tell people 'this is John Watson', before privately adding 'the one person who has gotten to know me, everything I am and all that I do, and has accepted it - and not only that, actually likes me, wants to be around me', because it really did mean the world to him to have found somebody who fit that description. 

He came back to the present for a moment, hit by the realisation that he was _holding_ and _comforting_ John when he was the one who had caused the devastation that had befallen them, and how very wrong it was. The whole reality was wrong.

John was right, he was completely and tragically right, about more than just who was to blame. There was always the frailty to Sherlock's genius, just as he had described - he needed the belief of those around him. But it wasn't enough for just anybody to believe in him. Sherlock was not a normal person, or even a normal genius. He accepted very few people into his world, so those few people were unbelievably important - and their faith in him, even more so.

It wasn't jumping that killed Sherlock. It was watching everything he had created for himself, everything he had crafted himself into, burn to the ground in the doubts of other people - the doubts of the man that had first given him the chance to showcase just how brilliant he was. 

Sherlock Holmes was dead before he fell, and not even John Watson could save him.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," John told him, calmer now, but still pressed into Lestrade's jacket as if avoiding having to look at the world without Sherlock Holmes a part of it, "I don't know what I'm going to do without him, I've failed him, he'll never even know how much he meant to me. Not just to me. To everyone."

Lestrade said nothing.

"Every fucking time that Sally called him a freak or you and the other blokes took the piss out of him, he just stood by and took it and I just stood by and watched."

"You didn't fail him, John, you were the only real friend he ever had."

"Wasn't enough to save him, though, was I?", he said, pulling away and looking up at Lestrade through still present tears, "And last night was enough to push him over the edge."

Lestrade couldn't bring himself to apologise once more. It meant nothing. It wouldn't bring him back.

John straightened his clothes with his hands and wiped his eyes on his sleeve with one, there-and-gone movement.

"He was my best friend," he stated, silent for a moment, before adding, "And I'll always believe in him."

Nothing was said as John turned away to leave, broken friendship and John's anger and resentment clearly apparent, despite an embrace of hurt and attempted comfort on Lestrade's part that probably wouldn't be spoken of again. 

However, there was one last question. One last query for the retiring (though not by choice) inspector.

"John, when he... when he called you, before it happened..."

John turned back to him.

"What did he tell you?"

John looked down at the floor, closed his eyes for just a second or two, and looked up once again.

"Nothing. Just 'goodbye'. And that he was sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

John shook his head at the man that he clearly considered the guilty party.

"Exactly."

With that, John was gone, and Lestrade was left alone with his memories and his burning, aching guilt. Memories of the lonely, dazed young man he first met, the road to recovery that he set him on, the cocktail of pride and resentment that hit home whenever Sherlock made a wise-crack on a case that he was solving, the surprise he felt when he discovered that _Sherlock Holmes_ had actually made a _friend_ , the surprise at how shockingly normal John turned out to be and, finally, memories of the happiness that it brought him to see what that lonely, dazed young man had grown into...

But most of all, overwhelming guilt at the fact he had let him slip through his fingers, when so many years ago, he had wanted so badly to turn the boy's life around.

John was right. This was his fault.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes. I think this went okay. I don't know. You should tell me.


End file.
